


The Edifying Fire

by MixolydianGrey



Category: Willie of Winsbury - Anaïs Mitchell
Genre: Alchemy, Animal Transformation, Ballads, Fun With Universal Solvents, Genderfluid, Genderplay, Incestuous Thoughts but No Actual Deeds, Multi, Oral Sex, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:40:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21826858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MixolydianGrey/pseuds/MixolydianGrey
Summary: My father is an alchemist. He swears he knew not what he did when he compounded me....
Relationships: Willie/Jane, Willie/the King
Comments: 11
Kudos: 11
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	The Edifying Fire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [goosecathedral](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goosecathedral/gifts).



My father is an alchemist. He swears he knew not what he did when he compounded me, for I was formed of adamantine. “A stubborn child,” said he. “You remain your unalloyed self most exactly, my dear Aurelia Jane,” he would sigh, clucking his tongue when I got into another scrape. Then he’d laugh and help me think of ways to mend my mischief and atone.

When I was a child, I wanted to know everything about the Great Art he practiced. I would trace the glyphs with my finger, asking, “Father, what do these shapes and sigils mean?” And he would tell me. “That is for fire, my daughter dear. That one is for water, and this one for earth.”

Now I am older, and and am bid stand naked on the stone, that he may know me by my shape if I be a maiden or none.

My shape and sigil has been changed, this I will allow. My apron is tight. My waist is round. I’ll not dissemble now. As I learned to read the symbols of alchemy that lay sharp and angular or flowed in curves, so does he easily read the truth of my body.

I knew why he wanted to know, and it was not what you think, unless you too are an alchemist.

He did not fear his property had been trespassed upon, my maidenhead absconded with, my marriage value gone. I was no object of political and economic barter to him, but a keen apprentice and a beloved daughter. No, he wanted to know if I were still fit to do those parts of the work which must be done by those who have never known carnal congress. Were I no longer eligible to serve so, it would inconvenience sorely, and he was impatient to get back to his workings now he was returned from his close confine in Spain.

My change of circumstances without regard for his work, our shared work, is what would anger him. And angered he was, once I admitted I was with child. When I named Willie, he demanded that every servingman come before him so that he might see this Willie of Winsbury, whom he said he wanted to hang.

* * *

My father was lost the moment he laid eyes on Willie. I saw it happen, even before he said, “Daughter mine, if I were a woman, I would have had him in my bed.”

Willie blossomed into a slow smile and said there was in truth enough of him to share.

After a long pause, my father allowed that while that might be so, there was a specific condition that he had mentioned which was not fulfilled in the present instance.

Willie said surely alchemists here knew something about the transmuting of forms, and had my father not that particular facet of the art yet, he would be glad to show him.

Alchemists also know something of the transmuting of envy or jealousy. I keep faith with this journal by only writing the truth. I write it in cipher as I am no fool — or, rather, it may be that I am a fool, but I am not a careless fool, particularly with the lives of those I love. In the spirit of that keeping faith, then, I must own that even in those first jealous instants when I saw the turning of my father’s attentions and heart toward my own true love, certain images came into my mind, running through it all like a bright vein through the rock. Lust strikes like lightning, crackling with heat and leaving behind a smell of brimstone.

* * *

I have said that my father was lost the moment he saw Willie, but more properly I should say that he was dissolved. Willie, like the alkahest, seems to be a universal solvent. I saw my father’s reaction. I saw further the way my father tried to hide the signs of his attraction. And I thought upon it deeply. After several weeks of consideration, I took Willie aside and told him what I had observed both in my father and in my own heart. My speech was most logical, enumerating the reasons for going forward with my admittedly unusual plan. I ended with, “No vessel can contain you, love, nor keep you from your will, so go you to my father now, and teach him your skill that he might transform to a woman in your arms.”

Willie was still as a stone. Then he said, “Is this truly your wish?”

I sighed. “I think it is rather the wish of the universe, or of that great chain of coincidence which some label Providence. I would not swim against the current of that river.”

Willie’s eyes gained a positively wicked glint. “And what do you want me to do with him, when he is a woman in my arms, my love?” he said.

I blinked. “Hmmm.” A flush of embarrassment rose first, but Willie knew my heart. He would not think the truth shameful, or if he did, he would welcome it as a piquant sauce upon meat. A slow smile came upon me. “What should you do with him? Thus, and thus,” I said, drawing him down upon me and suiting action to words as I itemized the possibilities with as much exactness and care as I had given to reciting alchemical symbols.

Willie’s ardour helped me settle myself to my decision. Or if not settle, at least pleasantly exhaust me to the point I languidly wished every other creature in the world could be as fortunate as I.

When I was a child, my father told me that jealousy and envy are signs that one is not attending properly to one’s own work. But oh, at the beginning it was hard to remember that. I do not speak of the beginning that was Willie’s and mine; we had already had near two years together. I speak of the beginning of the three of us. Do not mistake my words: I say “the three of us” not in the way that three may intersect all in the same time and place, but the way that three may orbit one another and thus make up a system, a constant and complex dance of attraction and exchange of emanations and forces.

I took one path with Willie, bright as a shooting star across the sky. My father took another, limned in a row of clouds like delicate smoke with a light behind it, showing gold at the edges. These paths crossed. The point of intersection? Willie.They say that it is only on the Cross that the Rose will bloom. And a glorious cross our lives do certainly make.

When Willie had taught my father the transformation magic he had spoken of, I was astonished by the result. My father came in before their tryst to show me his gown. Her gown, I ought say in all politeness. I clapped my hands in delight. “O father, thou art translated!”

“Let us hope the text is legible,” she murmured in a low contralto. She met my grin with one of her own, and departed for the king’s chambers. Her chambers.

The King she stood in a snow white gown  
All in her robing room  
And to her came Willie of Winsbury  
And made the rose to bloom

After that I became accustomed to seeing my father in woman’s form with some regularity, by which I inferred that Willie was as inexhaustible with all others as he was with me. Surely he never neglected me, neither in carnal ways nor in companionship and conversation, in work or in play; all the founts of joy flowed as freely as ever. As time passed, this plenitude plus my father’s obvious gratitude and delight melted any new tendrils of jealousy which ventured to spring up.

However, my father and I did have to come to a firm agreement on the subject of not borrowing my robes or gowns except by prior request and consent.

* * *

As time went on, I kept both my journal and a joint logbook of carnal alchemy, the latter containing the experimental notes on not only myself and Willie, but also Willie and my father. Of course we were both pursuing carnal alchemy with Willie. I was undeniably my father’s offspring and best student. There was nothing for either of us that was not also connected to the Great Work.

Willie found this most amusing. When he found that I did not object to such confidences but rather was inflamed by them, he began to tell me tales.

“Oh, Jane. Let me tell you which elements he wonders about when he wonders about the two of us, breast to breast.” And he would kiss me, and tell me and show me, urging me on through many strange and wonderful alchemical acts.

Brimstone, I thought, for heat. His touch surely brought that. And the salt, the salt on his cheeks from his tears, the tears he shed when the perfect true single bell-note of his mingled pain and pleasure rang out, was an echo of the salt I tasted on him below.

Willie rang like a bell, for me.

With my father, according to the experimental notes, he roared.

All this alchemy, piling up treasure for our house.

* * *

If there were no time, all of it would be happening at once. This would be a problem, for my father and I both choose, for some tolerably similar reasons plus a few that are particular to each of us, to maintain that separation. To use time as a pane of thin mica. To organize our separate times with Willie, one leaf upon the next, one page following the next, with a drawing on each that has shifted slightly from the one before.

Flip the pages quickly, and everything interpenetrates, but that is for a higher plane. Time does not work like that here. I say it’s just as well. Willie is intoxication and head-spinning enough without destroying the framework of time that keeps us organized.

Then again, dissolving the container of time is just like him, is it not? It was that one morning that we decided, my father and I, that Willie was the alkahest, for he would not remain in any container one put him in, unless it was itself unalloyed. Otherwise he dissolved any lines anyone tried to draw around him or vessel they tried to keep him in, be they physical container or philosophical category.

He was hard on the furniture and textiles as well. We have had to replace a great many bed coverings, and there is scarcely a bit of clothing without a scorch mark or on several memorable occasions, teeth marks.

* * *

It was the day I asked a new question that the work was elevated to a new plane of power and wonder. “Why?” said I. One word, yet it left my father dumbfounded.

He knew what I meant. Why did he hesitate at essaying the Great Work in the shape he was most at home in? Why not know Willie as a man with a man?

My father shook his head ruefully and said, “Daughter, you speak of acts quite outside the boundaries of what society will allow —“

“Progenitor, we left the boundaries of ‘what society will allow’ the first time you caught me reading one of your alchemical treatises and did not lift it from my hands and lock it away, but instead sat down next to me and explained the symbols and allusions.” I held his gaze.

“It is true,” said he, his cheeks coloring, “that I have thought upon it.”

So have I, father, I thought. So have I.

I am lucky that I do not blush easily.

* * *

Willie says embracing the self, whatever the self may be, is a strength that bursts all fetters, iron as well as social strictures and laws meant to keep us contained. He speaks of my father’s release from philosophical and behavioral confinement, saying it was an imprisonment that lasted so much longer than being a prisoner in Spain. Yet as I hear him say it, I believe he is speaking also of himself, and recollecting imprisonments past. He has not told us what they were. He has strong feelings about certain forms of power, play with it though he may in the bedchamber. He has declared that he will not be the lord of any man. He seems to take joy in dissolving the notion of lordship altogether. Not dissolving loyalty; never that. But dissolving constraints.

My father greets his freedom with amazement and joy. He leaves me careful notes of alchemical terms and symbols. Alchemists have long been used to working in code; another layer of meanings is no great burden. I translate the symbols and processes into body parts, actions, speed and force, quickness. Congresses, frequency and duration and types thereof. I add the information to our logbooks.

Often I am distracted and must needs go deal with that distraction that I might return to work with a clear mind. Willie says he can always tell when I have been recording experimental data. Brimstone and lightning indeed. He laughs with delight as he discovers my readiness. I go back to my work with a calmed mind, a sated body, and a smile where Willie has kissed my lips.

* * *

Some say sulfur and salt are the parents of Mercury. Mercury is known for inventiveness. Willie says he knows other combinations and permutations which might aid in our work.

Of course he does.

We shall definitely need a larger stock of logbook paper.

* * *

Alchemy demands a diligent student. I learn to change my shape. I look down at Willie, kneeling before me, his perfect bow of a mouth, my bit of new-conjured flesh the arrow. The sight melts me, every time. I have begun to notice my own walk, how my weight shifts and changes from one body to the next. I have brought some of my male self, my him-ness, into my woman-self. As Willie promised, I cross boundaries and barriers. I shift. I transmute. I trace my finger along the curves of Willie’s face, as he has oft done to me. He trembles. I feels the sparks rise.

I learn that one way to probe the truth of “as above, so below” is to find differences, play with contrasts. Apply heat. Apply the peeled root of the ginger. Apply the utterly focused attention that precedes and follows the blade of the knife. Willie is adept at roles on either side of the blade. And at others besides.

I learn that there are numbers higher than two, though we never cross the boundaries my father and I keep. Except, as Willie said, in imagination. Which he uses to powerful effect.

My father soon learns that whatever shape he takes, or she takes, or what-you-will takes, Willie is alchemist enough to work with them. It is the same with Willie and me when I change my form, or when he changes his. And there is a hidden truth each of us learns: the rose can bloom in all.

* * *

Half in jest, I asked Willie this morning if he were not an angel. He came back quickly with “Fallen, or of the sort still aloft?” I told him I was no longer certain I could make such a distinction. He crowed that his work here was bearing superlative fruit. I said between kisses that we were told little in detail of angels in the book itself, only in stories later.

“Tell me who wrote their stories,” he said, “and I’ll tell you who has something to gain by it.” Then he kissed me most thoroughly, saying with a wicked smile, “Now, speaking of falling, back to ‘as above, so below,’” and burrowed under the bedclothing to suit action to words.

* * *

So much has changed. Willie will not be lord of any man. Neither do my father the King and I keep the same sort of arrangements as we were used to. Our servingmen and women (and others, for we have several now who are none of either, and at least one who is both) sit at table with us, shoulder by shoulder. We serve each other. The hall rings with laughter. Those who live with us have prepared a stock of clothes for the child to come, each stitch the dearer and more beautiful for being given from love and not constraint. Their own children are better clothed than ever they have been. We are a scandal in the mouths of those who know us not, but here at home we love and are loved. We are building the New Eden.

After Willie told us he’d not be heir to my father’s land, the King put me on a milk white steed and himself on a dapple grey, and bid me ride all the long summer’s day. He pledged to give me heirship of all the land I could cover. My gender he declared no impediment. We smiled together, knowing now how little such impediment means to any of us.

It was this day gave Willie the notion to teach me the transformation to a horse, and also did he transform himself in the same manner. There was a fair amount of land covered that day as well, as well as covering of other sorts. According to the notes, he taught this transformation to my father later that week. Neither of us has been able to pass the stable since without a blush and a shiver.

* * *

Perhaps I was wrong in what I said earlier about the rose, or at the least, incomplete. There are always layers beyond the alchemical layer one currently apprehends. The rose is the joy at the heart of the Great Work, true, and have we the courage, we each have opportunity to bring it forth. And Willie in his lush red suit is also our own red rose, blooming on the cross fashioned of the intersecting loves of my father and myself. But I begin now to see that the whole world is where, if we follow our workings in perfect faith and perfect trust, we can weave a starry cross upon which to let New Eden bloom for all.

My father sees in Willie’s love the spiritual alkahest, dissolving what imprisons us. I see that, but also I see in him the action of that Stone of the philosophers, whereby base material may transmute to nobler selves in all.

We must choose gold now over lead. They both are burdens, but in life (which burdens hath, will we or nil) it seems to me the better part to strive for what shines like the sun.

And that one who comes after us — soon, soon! — may shine the brighter still.

* * *

(Note to self: hide logbooks well before the child learns to read. Leave alchemy texts out, though.)


End file.
